Thread: Restoring Razor with Mold

Withour removing scales you wont get the rust out of the pivot area. With rust still on the blade it can spread quicker. To properly restore pull pins and sand. But this can be a lot of work and depending on if you habe a few razors or just two, you might just clean it up the best you can, know that rust will come back, but shabe just fine. As long as the rust doesnt get to the edge. Then you got issues.

The pivot is notorious for rust. You should remove the scales. If your skill set or confidence is not there yet you can come back to this later. I believe Geezer has had good success at cleaning pivots with twisted dental floss and polish. Pull the pins and sand as stated above is the most comprehensive restore procedure.

If you don’t want to remove the scales and just do a cleanup, you have to decide how much pitting to live with.

You can chemically treat the pitting to stop or slow it down, I use Evaporust for that, you can spot apply repeatedly with a Qtip or brush. I don’t know if Fluid Film will penetrate and chemically alter or stop the rust, but you can test it. Pick a deep pit, treat with the fluid, allow to penetrate per instructions, then pick at the pit with a sharp awl or dental pick, see it there is active red rust at the bottom of the pit.

You can polish the blade with 400 and 600 grit Wet & Dry and bring to a high shine with 1000 and 2000, and finish with any good metal polish. The problem you may have is removing the deep 150 grit scratches. Aggressive sandpapers are a double edge sword and can cause more work. A wine cork, piece of rubber hose or large eraser make good sanding backers and will save your fingers for long term sanding. Erasers and corks can be cut and sanded to shape for better sanding contact.

You can make sanding sticks with wooden paint sticks and or coffee stir stick glued together and cut to size to fit between the scales and sand paper strips glued to the sticks to clean and polish, or wrap with sand paper. Gluing sand paper to a stick makes a “safe edge” sander to prevent sanding the scale and just the tang.

I use 1 inch, 3m Radial Bristle Polishing discs and a Dremel to clean and polish between the tang and the jimps. They are inexpensive and come in different grits, I use the 60 grit and 400 grits mostly. You can get a pack of grits from eBay for around $10-15. They also make larger 6 in wheels for buffers, that work great but run about 60-100 dollars.

If using a Dremel, do be careful, watch rotation, it is easy to ruin a razor with a Dremel. Think about what you about to do and pay attention.

Euclid440, that was a lot of good advise. I hope I have spare time soon to try them out! You're mentioning dental picks... is that because wooden toothpicks aren't tough enough for the job?